Share This Story!

Why hang on to your unlimited data plan?

Question. I've got an unlimited-broadband wireless plan, one that my carrier doesn't offer anymore. How can I keep that? Answer. If the concept of a meter running on your mobile bandwidth bugs you, your

Story Highlights

Question. I've got an unlimited-broadband wireless plan, one that my carrier doesn't offer anymore. How can I keep that?

Answer. If the concept of a meter running on your mobile bandwidth bugs you, your options to avoid that have shifted over the last few years.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless each stopped selling unlimited-data plans to new subscribers in 2010 — while T-Mobile restored an unlimited option last summer and Sprint never stopped selling unmetered data.

Let me throw out a possibly heretical thought there and say that for most wireless users, unlimited data isn't worth it.

I realize this can seem like a form of surrender: Those big, stupid carriers lured us in with all-you-can-eat pricing, they're taking it away, and you don't want to accept that! (I'm old enough to remember the collective glee when America Online ditched hourly access charges and moved to flat-rate billing.)

But if you look at how much data you actually use each month, you may be surprised by how low that number goes. From early March to early April — a period in which I overused my phone at the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin and shared more than 900 megabytes of data with my laptop — I only racked up 2.13 gigabytes.

The more relevant number here has a dollar sign before it — why pay extra for data you don't use?

To check your data usage in current versions of Android, open the phone's Settings app and tap "Data usage" for a graph of that over the last month, helpfully broken down on an app-by-app basis.

The same tool on an iPhone — launch its Settings app, then tap General, then Usage, then "Cellular Usage" — only gives a cumulative total unless you reset it and then remember to check a month later. (It also doesn't show which apps were the biggest data hogs; for that, the tool of choice seems to be the $4.99 DataMan Pro.)

Instead, check your monthly statement at your wireless carrier. Saving $10 a month by cutting back on your data plan may not be much, but $120 a year is still real money.

Tip: It's okay to hoard charging cables

If you look in my car and either bag I might carry a laptop in, you'll find the same thing: a spare micro-USB cable that I can use to charge my phone from any nearby outlet or computer. Even if I didn't have a random assortment of surplus cables floating around my office from old review hardware, the low, low cost of these generic cables make them a cheap form of insurance.